1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a speech dialogue service apparatus and method, and more particularly, to a speech dialogue service apparatus and method of analyzing a dialogue style sentence including a natural language uttered by a user, analogizing omitted information of the sentence via dynamic context management, and analyzing and performing an intention of the user, thereby precisely analyzing and performing an uttered content of the user even when the user utters in the natural language as an ordinary dialogue instead of uttering only in a certain type of dialog capable of being recognized by a system.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, technologies relating to home networks have been rapidly developing. Via home networks, home electronics such as a television, a video tape recorder, a telephone, a washer, and a refrigerator are connected to each other and users may enjoy various benefits by such network connections of home electronics.
In conventional technologies, to control home electronics by home networks, users must know a command system corresponding to each home electronics device or know the corresponding command system to interact with home electronics device. For example, users may directly control home electronics by using a remote control or a portable device.
However, as the so-called “Ubiquitous era” comes of age, methods of directly controlling home electronics by users as described above are being gradually substituted by methods in which home electronics are controlled by recognizing contents of dialogue uttered by users and executing corresponding operations.
Methods of controlling dialogue type home electronics include, speech recognition technology for receiving and converting a speech of users into a text and a technology for applying a dialogue type order analyzed by speech recognition to home electronics connected via home networks.
However, according to the described conventional method of controlling home electronics by speech recognition, there is a restriction on utterance contents of users. Specifically, users are must utter just a few instructions capable of being recognized by a home electronics control system to control home electronics. Accordingly, users must know well the instructions capable of being recognized by the system to control home electronics.
Therefore, dialogue type speech recognition services in which a user may more freely utter an instruction in a natural language and a system that may recognize the uttered natural language instruction and control home electronics are being developed. According to the dialogue type speech recognition services, the user does not need to previously know well a certain instruction and instead utters a word capable of being generally recognized, thereby easily controlling home electronics.
As a conventional dialogue type speech recognition service model, U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,090 and U.S. Patent Application No. 2002/0133347 disclose service models in which a keyword list is made by extracting a keyword from utterance contents of a user, a template corresponding to the keyword is extracted from a database, and a response is determined by comparing the templates with each other.
Also, U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,246,981 and 6,786,651 disclose service models in which expected dialogue forms are previously recorded and a response is provided according to a predetermined scenario corresponding to utterance contents of a user for each category, thereby recognizing an intention of the user.
However, in the aforementioned conventional dialogue type speech recognition services, since a natural language instruction uttered by a user is recognized by referring to standardized words previously inputted, there is a restriction on natural language analysis whose target is similar to a literary style or limited sentence combination. Specifically, in most natural language sentences uttered by the user, a word or phrase is omitted, tenses are not consistent and/or an order is inversed. Accordingly, a meaning itself may be ambiguous, and the natural language constructed by the imperfect sentence cannot be precisely recognized by the conventional services.
Also, when analyzing the intention of the user according to a certain scenario, it is not possible to correspond to general dialogue environments in which the intention of the user is frequently changed and cannot be estimated according to circumstances.
Accordingly, development of a dialogue type speech recognition service model capable of inducing a more intelligent and natural dialogue by more precisely analyzing and responding to imperfect sentence contents of a natural language instruction uttered by the user is required.